A scene in Bobby Zithelo‘s film This Land, a documentary about immigration in Ireland, captures something so apparently routine that you could easily take it for granted: we witness a moment when someone discovers the joy of theatre for the first time.
The writer Felispeaks, aka Felicia Olusanya, is talking about Boy Child, the play she wrote with Dagogo Hart about a young fatherless man in Nigeria and his path through the world, which was staged in Dublin in 2018. She describes a moment when a black man approached her after one performance to say, “Now I understand why white people go to the theatre.”
Felispeaks seems mind-blown. “Tell me more,” she says.
“It is so interesting seeing myself being represented onstage,” he replies.
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The writer, visibly stirred, tells the camera, “Why I say it’s important to represent people who don’t even know they need representation is because of moments like that.”
Boy Child was certainly a rare offering in a country where most plays are about white people. Hart says that he and Felispeaks – both slam poets – had wanted to collaborate; they settled on a play featuring poetry. “We wrote the poems, and got actors in the room to figure out the dialogue around these poems,” he says. “We are poets. We’re not playwrights.”
It could be fair to describe Boy Child as two-dimensional. Its story of a young man escorted through the pitfalls of toxic masculinity by entrancing, verse-speaking women feels a little flat and fable-like. When Hart’s next play, Mmanwu, about a widowed, single-parent poet who moves in with her father in rural Nigeria, premiered in 2023, it was strikingly three-dimensional, its plot and subplot spiking off in unexpected directions.
Hart owes part of its achievement to the Baptiste Programme, a scriptwriting initiative for black Irish and people of colour, which Smock Alley Theatre launched in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, the African-American man who died in Minneapolis after a white police officer kneeled on his neck for more than nine minutes on May 25th, 2020.
Amid the Black Lives Matter protests that followed across the world, theatre in the US and Europe was not immune to questions about its commitment to equity. Cultural organisations issued messages of support for protesters and pledged action on racism. Industry workers signed open letters calling for reform. In a New York Times interview with theatre leaders who are black, Kwame Kwei-Armah, of the Young Vic in London, said, “What I am really clear about is there is a tax from our white audiences, many of whom are quite tribal, and who, the moment that they see someone black on the poster, think that [the play] is somehow niche.”
Julia Wissert, artistic director of the German theatre company Schauspiel Dortmund, spoke candidly about the medium’s whiteness: “I just hate speaking about diversity, because I’m not interested in diversity. I don’t want to diversify anything. I’m interested in the question of representation.”
Here at home, a note of disenchantment was voiced by the actor Daryl McCormack, who, after half a decade acting on Irish stages, was moving into roles in big-budget films. He tweeted: “Although I’ve been a part of Irish theatre and will always want to be, I’ve always felt that it wasn’t necessarily my home ever.”
Some places responded emphatically. A season of seven new plays by black playwrights was swiftly announced for Broadway, including Antoinette Nwandu’s absurdist Pass Over (a successor to Waiting for Godot, but infused with the weariness of black men seeking transcendence) and Lynn Nottage’s comedy Clyde‘s, in which a truck-stop diner becomes a purgatory for ex-convicts, who, like the play itself, seem desperate to escape the past.
In Ireland, the Abbey Theatre committed to An Octoroon, an extraordinary American work with an Irish connection. In the play, a version of its playwright, Branden Jacob-Jenkins, is seen depressed and in therapy after a project has fallen apart. (“The minute you ask a white guy to play a racist whose racism isn’t ‘complicated’ by some monologue, he doesn’t return your phone calls.”)
His therapist advises him to rewrite his favourite play, the ambiguous, slave-era melodrama The Octoroon, by the Irish playwright Dion Boucicault. (Jacob-Jenkins’s 2014 play would later be joined Michael R Jackson’s musical A Strange Loop and Radha Blank’s film The 40-Year-Old Version, among other works, in painting an industry inhabited by producers interested only in palatable depictions of blackness, and in which artists of the global majority lack the privilege of many of their white peers.)
By sheer coincidence, the Abbey wasn’t alone. At the Gate, overlapping with the run of An Octoroon, was Frankenstein: How to Make a Monster, a touring production from London reimagining Mary Shelley’s novel via beatboxing. In a rare sight, the stages of Dublin’s two main theatres were lit up by casts who were mostly non-white.
Then a familiar pattern of homogenously white voices and bodies re-established itself.
Some see the establishment’s embrace of colourblind casting – the positioning within a production of an actor of the global majority in a way that invites the audience to “unsee” their race – as a superficial gesture towards diversity.
A mixed-race artist of the global majority whose plays have been produced professionally (and who asks for anonymity, to avoid repercussions for their career) says: “It seems some people think that having one actor of marginalised identity in this kind of role is their quota met, but in my opinion it’s not enough. Why not stage work with specificity, where a black woman can play a character who was written as a black woman? Why not have more plays with a majority nonwhite cast? I do not believe this is difficult.”
The top 10 recipients of theatre funding from the Arts Council since 2020 – which, alongside the Abbey and the Gate, include Druid and Dublin Theatre Festival, among others – have so far announced 25 productions for 2025. Only two are by playwrights of the global majority: The Black Wolfe Tone, by Kwaku Fortune for Fishamble, in which a mixed-race man’s intergenerational trauma plays out in a psychiatric hospital; and the intriguingly titled Bán, Carys D Coburn’s transposition, for the Abbey, of the Lorca drama The House of Bernarda Alba to Éamon de Valera’s Ireland.
“What we end up doing most of the time in the bigger spaces,” Hart says, “is tell stories we think the majority of the audience will come in and enjoy – who, traditionally, are white Irish people. I think it has to be more than that.” (It should be noted that Ireland‘s diversity is increasing. Dublin 1, the postcode of both the Abbey and the Gate, is widely considered the most multicultural part of the capital.)
There have, at least, been signs of change on the periphery. If you’ve been to Dublin Fringe Festival in recent years you may have found yourself sitting in a strikingly diverse crowd. The festival’s Weft mentorship programme for early-career artists of the global majority – another initiative introduced after the Black Lives Matter protests five years ago – has heralded several new works, including Samuel Yakura’s eloquent The Perfect Immigrant, the feminist satire Hive City Legacy, and Alessandra Azeviche’s searching dance Terra.
“A lot of artists of colour make work on the fringe by self-funding it – they go into debt – and there is no follow-through,” says Joy Nesbitt, an American playwright and director based in Dublin. “That is where I thought the bigger houses would invest more, by trying to bring those artists out of that space and offer resources to expand the plays, but also to make their own audiences more open to plays, like audiences are open on the fringe.”
Nesbitt says that top-down representation could also lead to the Irish staging of overseas successes, such as the subversive comedy Fairview, by Jackie Sibblies Drury, about a middle-class black family who are surveilled by white commentators (and, the play knows, a white audience), and Jacobs-Jenkins’s hit drama Appropriate, which exposes a rotting family tree when feuding siblings, reuniting after the death of their father, discover heirlooms linking them to racist atrocities.
For Hart, such programming decisions could be inspiring – but are also something he can’t afford to wait for. “The revolution isn’t going to happen by us waiting for those institutions to change,” he says. “It’s going to happen from us on the ground changing, and them not having any choice.”
The Black Wolfe Tone is at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, June 4th-14th; Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray, Co Wicklow, June 17th-18th; and Cork Midsummer Festival, June 20th-21st. Bán, by Carys D Coburn, opens at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, on October 6th, with previews from September 30th
